Monday, November 13, 2017

In a few of
our earlier posts, we've mentioned that there don't seem to be that many
comales (tortilla griddles) at Calixtlahuaca. This suggests that the ancient
inhabitants of the site were eating their corn in some way other than
tortillas, such as hominy, atole (gruel), or tamales. Tamales are the most
likely alternative to tortillas, and there is a great quote in the Florentine
Codex about the diet of the the Quaquata (one of the groups in the Toluca
Valley):

“Nothing
grew in the land of these Quaquata; only maize, beans, amaranth; no chili, no
salt. The principal foods of these were tamales, beans; also their principal
drink was fruit atole. Popcorn was produced right there in their land” (Sahagún
1950-82:Book 10: The People. Pp 182-183).

Unfortunately,
it's harder to identify pots for tamale steaming, since a large pot can be used
for any number of other tasks. One possible candidate for tamale pots are the
type that we call interior-incised ollas. This type of large olla has sloppy,
deeply scored incision on the interior of the body below the neck. The
incisions can't be seen unless the pot is broken, which means that they weren't
there for decoration. The incisions are also problematic for most forms of food
preparation, since any liquid food would get stuck in them and burn, but we
don't see any evidence for scorched reside in the incisions. However, the
incisions would have been helpful for keeping the lattice of sticks used to
keep tamales out of the steaming liquid from sliding around, and the tamales
themselves from sticking to the walls of the pot. This type is not found in
Morelos or the Basin of Mexico, where there are much higher frequencies of
comales.

Interior-incised olla sherds

The
distribution of these pots among the different households at the site also
supports the idea that they were used for steaming tamales. Once comales start to
used in noticeable frequencies at the site (during the Yata phase), the
frequency of interior-incised ollas varies inversely with the frequency of
comales; households were picking one or the other!

2016 The Effects of
Aztec Conquest on Provincial Commoner Households at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico.
Doctoral Dissertation, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona
State University, Tempe, AZ.

Sahagún, Bernardino de

1950-82 Florentine Codex, General History of the Things
of New Spain. 12 books. Translated and Edited by Arthur J.O. Anderson and
Charles E. Dibble. School of American Research, Santa Fe NM, and the University
of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, UT.